Water Injection - Nos, Questions About Both Options

[nObOdy]

So im confused - i was reading some posts and i came across one that talked about how nos is completly flammable - well i was curious and i looked around in some more posts and it seems that a lot of people think Nos is flammable - but.. it isnt is it? it basically is oxygen that when heated to 565 degrees' it expands and creates an assload more oxygen and cools things down?

Also - I had heard of Water Injected Engines - well i was really curious as to what the heck that means - the last i heard of it was on a 3s-gte swap someone was doing and they found out thier version was water injected? What is that??
wouldnt you use antifreeze if it was used to keep temps down? ??

thanks in advance - sorry if this has been answered - i looked around for a while
nObOdy

[Dr_Tweak]

Okay well first of all, the idea that N20 is flammable comes from the Fast and the Furious where the car blows up. Not true, it basically acts just like air. It does, however, do two things: gives more oxygen into the airstream, and cools it down. So basically you got it right.

Now water injection is a sort of "band-aid" solution to not using an intercooler. Basically, there's a little water sprayer that gets put into the intake tube after the turbo, and when you're boosting and you're at wide open throttle, it activates the sprayer. This actually sprays water into your engine! But what happens is, the water evaporates and as it does so it cools the intake charge down a lot. That way it's like having an intercooler. You can also use alcohol (windshield washer fluid actually works quite well). That's why you also hear the term alcohol injection.

Personally, I would never design a kit to use water injection INSTEAD of a true intercooler. It's just a bad idea overall and a band-aid solution to a poorly thought out turbo system. However, it is good to use in addition to an intercooler especially in racing applications (drag racing).

Now as far as a 3SGTE coming with this stock, I can tell you right now that's not true. What it might have had is a intercooler sprayer system. Now these are very cool and work in a similar way. Basically there is a water sprayer mounted so that it can spray water on the OUTSIDE of your intercooler. Now when you go to wide open throttle, the sprayer opens up and wets your intercooler right down. Then the water evaporates off and carries away a lot of heat with it. It's not system that runs all the time, just when you step on it to give you an extra boost. The STi and I believe the EVO VIII also come stock with these systems, so I wouldn't be suprised if a GT-4 did as well. Not to be confused with water INJECTION!!!

Now to add some more confusion into the mix, there is ALSO something called a nitrous intercooler sprayer. This is just like what I described above, but instead of using water or alcohol, it uses N20. Since N20 is very cold coming out of the bottle, it cools the outside of the intercooler down quite a bit.

This post has been edited by raven_101: May 11, 2005 - 4:58 AM